v.. To move a tall, flat bottomed object (such as a bookshelf) by swiveling it alternatively on its corners in a "walking" fashion. [After the book by Thor Heyerdahl theorising the statues of Easter Island were moved in this fashion.] source: LangMaker.com. Aku Aku also has another meaning to the islanders: a spiritual guide.

28 entries categorized "Travel"

This weeks project is a portion of a larger project. I mentioned before the site Scooping Argentina and the short videos they make explaining Buenos Aires slang to English speakers. For example: Berreta:

My project this week is my first script for doing something similar. You can imagine what next weeks project is going to be. Please leave suggestions for other Northern California slang that should be covered! I've registered the domain Slangsh0t.com and will build a site that can host a series of these in various languages. More on that later as well.

(japanese)

Hello. This is _______________ of Slangsh0t.

Californians have their own slang dialect that is not used elsewhere in the United States. Scooping Californa is here to equate you with the words of the natives.

Today we are going to learn about the word, hella.

Hel la

Hella means 'very', or 'extremely'. It is an intensifier word, primarily used to modify an adjective.

For example:

(english)

That dog is hella filthy, I think it rolled in mud.

(japanese)

or That dog is hella filthy, I think it rolled in mud.

Exaggerated pronunciation can be used to intensify the intensifier:

(english)

That dog is HELLa filthy. I think it rolled in its own feces.

(japanese)

That dog is HELLa filthy. I think it rolled in its own feces

Hella has a diminished version: hecka. This version is primarily used by children who would get in trouble for saying hella.

It's taken me a bit of time and effort, but I am now all set up here in Brazil. I have settled into a small beach town called Garopaba in the southern state of Santa Catarina where I have a 2 BR apartment with wifi Internet, views overlooking the town and the bay and a 15 minute walk to the beach (for about US$200/month inclusive).
I've decided that an ongoing travelogue doesn't fit in well with the posting history I have on this AkuAku.org weblog, and have been wanting to experiment with typepad anyhow, so I have set up a new weblog there specifically for my travel diaries. The first entry is now up, hopefully I can catch up to real time in the next few days. Still struggling with procuring a moblogging solution, but I will be working on that too.
Travels: Arrival in Brasil: Rio

People like to collect things (be the first on your block to collect all seven!). People also like to mark things off lists. I've made lists of things I've already done or obtained, just for the pleasure of crossing them out. A common mix of these two urges is collecting evidence of travel, such as passport stamps; a friend's wife collects kitschy little regional snow globes depicting such plausible scenarios as the Alamo in a snow flurry.

Today a posting at Creative Commons led me to an online site called world66 that lets you check off your travel accomplishements in a web form and obtain an image and the necessary HTML for posting it to your web site. Very nicely executed.

The maps are a lead in for an open travel guide, where travlers create and maintain the content themselves. You can add or update any information you like. The site is basically a wiki, like the much acclaimed Wikipedia. All content on the site is under a Creative Commons license which says that anyone can use, redistribute or make derivate works, for commercial or non-commercial purposes, as long as they give attribution and maintain the license terms for their derived works. Bravo.

Yet it has another identity, known to only a few, which makes those acquainted with it see Porton Down as a jewel. It is a time capsule of a forgotten countryside which has created probably the single best wildlife site in Britain.

For example, it is beyond doubt Britain's the best site for butterflies. The ultra-high-security 7,000-acre Ministry of Defence estate north-east of Salisbury consists largely of unspoiled flower-rich chalk grasslands, dotted with woods, where 46 of our 55 native butterfly species, or 83 per cent, have been recorded, more than at any other location.

The public can visit, but you must write in to reserve a tour spot and it is currently booked up through the summer of 2005. I'm thinking about booking a spot now and planning a trip around it later....

These are some photos of the men's room at the 1st International Moblogging Conference that I took with Mie's cell phone camera. Pictured, Justin Hall took some time away for his moderator duties to appreciate the bathroom gallery. I liked the assortment of photographs printed out and hung on the walls and ceiling, and the serpentine ink illustration that was a repeated motif around the room. But the first thing that caught my eye was the handwritten aphorism EVERYBODY WILL REMEMBER GARY COLEMAN. You just can't argue with that.

While looking dreamily through the Fam Frauenfelder's Rarotonga island life web journal I read that there is an 80% completed Sheraton resort there which was abandoned in the early 90s and is now slowly returning to nature. I find modern ruins inveterately compelling, perhaps because of the John Crhistopher books I devoured in my pree-teen years which seemed always to portray a post-apocalyptic landscape consisting of decaying Industrial Age ruins.

I quickly emailed Mr Fraunfelder requesting he take a photo of the hotel for his online gallery, and then thought to do a google search in the meantime, coming up with one photo amongst a good quality travel album.

I wish I had a midi file of Talking Head's Nothing But Flowers to embed with this post as a soundtrack :)